There is a luxury apartment building on State Farm Road in Guilderland now. Hamilton Parc, they call it. Rooftop terrace. Fitness center. Studio units starting at $2,475 a month. If you drove past it this past spring and felt that vague, unplaceable sadness that Capital Region people get when something familiar is gone and something generic has taken its place, that feeling has a name. It is called Hiawatha Trails. And before that, it had another name entirely: Dominic F. Ferraioli. Most people who played that course over its fifty-year run never knew who built it. You don't think about that when you're standing on a par-3 tee on a Tuesday evening in July, trying to get home before dark. You're thinking about the shot in front of you. But somebody cleared that land. Somebody laid out those holes. Somebody drove over to his greenhouse that morning and picked flowers to plant along the fairway, because that was the kind of man he was.
A Guilderland Man Through and Through Dominic Ferraioli was born in Schenectady on March 30, 1915, but Guilderland was where he put down roots and never pulled them up. He ran a floor covering business out of Schenectady in the early 1950s. Through his construction company, Normanvale Construction Co., he built roughly 35 homes in the Guilderland area. He was the kind of man who woke up early, worked without complaint, and didn't wait for someone else to build the thing he wanted to see built. He served in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. He flew his own plane to Canada for caribou hunting. He kept a 41-foot cruiser on the St. Lawrence River at Alexandria Bay. Two weeks before he died, he sailed through the Panama Canal, something he had quietly wanted to do his entire life. Dominic Ferraioli was a man who kept a list and kept working through it. Golf was on the list. It had been for a long time.
The Dry Well That Changed Everything Here is the part of this story that doesn't exist in any golf history database, because it comes from a decades-old newspaper clipping that most people have never laid eyes on. In the early 1960s, Normanvale Construction Co. went before the Guilderland Town Board with a request to rezone a parcel along State Farm Road from residential to permit a driving range. The board said no. So Ferraioli's team, through their attorney Frank Williams, withdrew the request and signaled they would return with a different proposal entirely: a full golf course. The residential zoning was already a moot point anyway. Normanvale had originally intended to build houses on that land, but the project had to be abandoned because the ground simply couldn't support it. There wasn't enough water. What the land could support, it turned out, was fairways. Sometimes a dry well points you somewhere better. Ferraioli opened a driving range on State Farm Road in 1963, ran it for a time, and eventually sold it. But the idea of a golf operation of his own had taken hold and wouldn't let go. By around 1970, he was back on that same Route 155 corridor with the full vision realized: Hiawatha Trails Executive Golf Course. Eighteen holes. Bentgrass greens and fairways. Four par-4s and a collection of par-3s that rewarded patience and penalized carelessness. He designed the layout himself, with no outside architect and no consultant. Just a man with a feel for land and an instinct for how a golf hole ought to sit in it. And those flowers planted along the fairways that you might have noticed if you played there? He grew them in his own greenhouse and put them in the ground himself. That one detail tells you more about Dominic Ferraioli than any résumé could.
What Hiawatha Trails Actually Was Hiawatha Trails was never going to appear on any list of great American golf courses, and it wasn't trying to. It played just over 2,300 yards. You could finish 18 holes in about two and a half hours. The whole thing was built around a single idea: that golf belongs to everyone, not just people with the time and money for a full country club experience. That was the point. It was always the point. Geoffrey Van Epps took over running the operation in 1996 and kept it going for more than two decades. He raised his children on that property. He ran junior summer camps there for 18 years, relaxed and unstructured, the kind of camps where the goal was simply to get kids excited about being outside and hitting a ball. "Who cares if they hit it forward or backward," he said, "as long as no one gets hurt?" A lot of those kids went on to play high school golf. More importantly, they remembered where it all started. At its peak, the league play at Hiawatha Trails was something to behold for anyone who remembers Capital Region golf from that era. Golfers signed up and played five nights a week. The parking lot overflowed. Van Epps would look up and down Route 155 and over toward Western Turnpike on Route 20 and both courses were packed every evening through the summer. This was the 518 golf culture that older players remember with something close to reverence: weeknight leagues, working-class golf, the particular rhythm of a game that fit itself into the hours after dinner without asking much from you except to show up.
The Math That Stopped Working The decline of small independent golf courses in upstate New York is a complicated story, but at Hiawatha Trails it came down to something fairly simple and genuinely unfair. Van Epps paid property taxes every year with no exceptions. Western Turnpike, purchased by the Town of Guilderland in 2004, paid none. He bought equipment at full market price. A new fairways mower cost $90,000. A greens mower ran another $35,000. The town course purchased equipment through state contracts at discounted rates. Both operations competed for the same pool of golfers, faced the same upstate weather, and had the same narrow seasonal window to generate a full year of revenue. The decks were not stacked evenly. League play dried up as older golfers aged out and younger players didn't fill the gap in the numbers needed. The Tiger boom of the early 2000s gave a brief surge of new interest, but it faded faster than anyone hoped. By February 2018, Van Epps stood before the community and announced Hiawatha Trails would close. "I thought I would never leave this house," he said. "I thought I would do this for the rest of my life. But it's not economically feasible anymore." He and his wife, Michelle had lived on that property and raised their family there. This was not just a business shutting its doors. It was a life being pulled up by the roots.
The Fight That Followed Guilderland didn't accept the loss quietly. When a Brooklyn-based development company proposed replacing the course with a 256-unit, four-story luxury senior living complex, nearly 500 residents signed a petition against it. A citizens' group called the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth formed specifically in response to the project. Neighbors in the Presidential Estates development across Route 155 filed an Article 78 legal proceeding against the zoning board. People showed up to town board meetings, made their arguments, cited precedent, and asked the Industrial Development Agency not to grant millions in tax breaks to an out-of-town developer building market-rate luxury housing on land that had served the community for half a century. They lost. The courts ruled the plaintiffs lacked legal standing. The IDA approved $3.1 million in tax exemptions for the project. The fairways were torn up. The clubhouse where Van Epps had served burgers, hot dogs, and cold drinks to generations of Capital Region golfers was demolished. Hamilton Parc opened in 2024 with studio apartments starting at $2,475 a month, considerably more than the $16 it used to cost to walk 18 holes on a weekday at the course that once stood there.
What Remains Dominic Ferraioli died in 1999 at the age of 84. He died while his course was still alive, still full of league golfers on Tuesday nights, still hosting kids at summer camp, still exactly what he built it to be. He never saw the closure notice. He never sat through the IDA hearings. He never watched the fairways come up or the clubhouse come down. In a way, that is the only mercy in this story. Two years after his death, the Dominic Ferraioli Foundation was established in his name. It still operates today, based in Gloversville, quietly distributing grants to medical facilities across the Capital Region including Albany, Saratoga Springs, Latham, Schenectady, and Loudonville. The foundation holds more than $3 million in assets and continues to honor a man who believed in putting something back into the community that shaped him. He was a veteran, a pilot, a builder, a hunter, a boatman. He grew flowers in a greenhouse and planted them on a golf course he had designed himself because he believed a golf course ought to be beautiful, not just functional. He opened a driving range when the town said no to his first idea and built a golf course when the land couldn't hold enough water for houses. He did not wait for someone else to create the thing he wanted to see exist. He looked at a piece of ground along State Farm Road and decided it was going to become something people would use, love, and come back to year after year. For fifty years, they did.
There are courses like Hiawatha Trails scattered across the 518 that never made any magazine's top ten list, never attracted a professional tournament, never got written up anywhere beyond the local paper. They were just there, season after season, Tuesday nights in July, the same faces in the same spots, the same handshakes in the parking lot afterward. When they go, they take something with them that can't really be rebuilt. Not a golf course. A community. The next time you're out on a Capital Region course, any course, it's worth a moment to think about who built it. Who fought to zone it. Who designed the routing by feel and planted flowers along the fairway because they wanted it to be something worth caring about. The history of golf in the 518 is full of stories like Dominic Ferraioli's. We just need to tell them before they disappear too.
Sources
Dominic Ferraioli Foundation. "About Our Founder." DFF Foundation, dffoundation.org/about-our-founder. Accessed April 2026. Floyd Mair, Elizabeth. "Two of Guilderland's Six Golf Courses Closing." The Altamont Enterprise, 22 Feb. 2018, altamontenterprise.com/02222018/two-guilderland%E2%80%99s-six-golf-courses-closing. Floyd Mair, Elizabeth. "IDA Approves $3.1M in Tax Breaks for Hiawatha Trails." The Altamont Enterprise, 29 Sept. 2021, altamontenterprise.com/09292021/ida-approves-31m-tax-breaks-hiawatha-trails. Floyd Mair, Elizabeth. "Luxury Senior Housing Comes to Guilderland After Years of Controversy." The Altamont Enterprise, 9 Jan. 2024, altamontenterprise.com/01092024/luxury-senior-housing-comes-guilderland-after-years-controversy. Floyd Mair, Elizabeth. "Citizens' Group Urges Responsible Growth in Guilderland." The Altamont Enterprise, 27 Sept. 2018, altamontenterprise.com/09272018/citizens-group-urges-responsible-growth-guilderland. "Rezone Responsibly: Stop the Beastly Hiawatha Trails Project." The Altamont Enterprise, 15 Feb. 2018, altamontenterprise.com/02152018/rezone-responsibly-stop-beastly-hiawatha-trails-project. "French's Hollow Fairways GC, Hiawatha Trails Executive GC to Close." Club and Resort Business, 7 Oct. 2018, clubandresortbusiness.com/frenchs-hollow-fairways-gc-hiawatha-trails-executive-gc-close. "Hiawatha Trails." Albrecht Golf Guide, 1golf.eu/en/club/hiawatha-trails-exec-course. Accessed April 2026. "Hiawatha Trails." GolfPass, golfpass.com/travel-advisor/courses/9404-hiawatha-trails. Accessed April 2026. "The Dominic Ferraioli Foundation." Candid Foundation Directory, fconline.foundationcenter.org/fdo-grantmaker-profile?key=FERR043. Accessed April 2026. Guilderland Town Board. Meeting records and local newspaper clipping regarding Normanvale Construction Co. zoning withdrawal, State Farm Road, Guilderland, NY. Early 1960s. Primary source document.